Alight in Ashes

Profound Lore; 2012

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Music from this release

Menace Ruine: "Salamandra"

When Geneviève Beaulieu's duo Menace Ruine first took its metallic drones to the stage, she rejected the notion that their music somehow warranted external attention. "I didn't see the point of doing shows because it seemed like nonsense for me being the centre of attention for 30 or 45 minutes," she explained in a 2011 interview. "Isn't it a little pretentious, or even dangerous, to expose yourself like this?" And three years before, in an interview with Pitchfork, she aspired to a new way of transcendence that cast the world itself behind a shadow of oblivion: "The ideal would be to live on a strictly energetic plane... My way is to put distance between me and the world and allow myself not to be there, to live more on what is coming from the inside with the least earthly preoccupations possible."

Echoes of those ideas-- breaking the cycle of human existence to explore alternative ways to be born, to live and to die-- cycle throughout Alight in Ashes, the fourth album from the Montreal pair of Beaulieu and instrumentalist S. de La Moth. "Now I am ready to let go of things and those that I have loved in my life," she sings during album closer "Cup of Oblivion", her voice suddenly soaring. Elsewhere, she explores the creation myth of the salamander, an animal once purported to be born of fire, and how accepted ideas of what living means are certainly fallible-- "You've proved that souls don't burn in Hell," she offers.

But with Menace Ruine, such ideas take shape off the page, too. Across the album's 62 minutes, a deluge of carefully ordered sounds creates a mesmerizing tide of music. Guitars, keyboards, drums, and drum machines weave together horizontally, forming a dynamic canvas through which Beaulieu's beautiful voice dips and crests. With its glowing tones ordered into hypnotic arrays, Alight in Ashes suggests something of a ritual, with Beaulieu presiding over the doctrines like a priestess. It's immersive and transfixing, tones dangling as lures to woo you into whatever lifestyle Beaulieu proselytizes. During "Arsenikon (Faded in Discord)", she lands upon a mantra concerning the scourges of worldly worry: "Eroded, moldering away/ Flowing out of our own body/ Evil expels evil," she sings, her clipped vocals cycling through a loop that stretches and shrinks syllables and time. Nested above a surging bed of noise, those vocal circles wrap into an unavoidable vortex. You want in. And though Beaulieu stays silent during the instrumental "Burnt Offerings", its submerged organ melody and underlying growl of guitar noise work as opiates, offering the same sort of hypnosis as Nurse with Wound or Tony Conrad's Joan of Arc. On Alight in Ashes, Menace Ruine's dark beauty beckons without pause or fail.

Even at its most aggressive (opener "Set Water to Flames" flashes out in a wall of sound backed by heavy military drums) or slightest (see the simply distorted whorls during "Disease of Fear"), every sound on Alight in Ashes feels of a piece. Beaulieu and de la Moth create and sustain an atmosphere that becomes its own spotlight and, indeed, seems whisked away from the rest of the world. Menace Ruine first emerged with links to several cadres of bands, from black metal or new age to power electronics or astral folk. They retain qualities of all those realms, whether in black metal's obsessive saturation or Beaulieu's singing, which seems like a readymade female foil for Current 93's David Tibet. But the real success of Alight in Ashes isn't that it is doubtlessly Menace Ruine's most singular and identifiable synthesis of those strains to date, but that, when the record is playing, outside factors like influences and contemporaries seem momentarily too distant to consider.